Revision as of 21:51, 7 October 2016

_ID_ is an internationally recognized, award-winning cybershaman and Dasein-alchemist. Operates at the intersections of art, science and new technologies, in the fields of neurocinema, bio-art and hybrid art, uses mixed realities, machine vision, artificial life, simulacra, synthetic and virtual entities.

His main obsessions are identity, the existence of space-time, the emergence of organic life and consciousness. His works and installations are renown for merging biomorph and evolutionary aesthetic, scientific knowledge, technical sophistication, strong critical concepts, and powerplay with the processes of observation and perception.

Ivor is the founder of _humane after people_ - an art-science group addressing questions of the future of the human condition, aiming for a machine-unreadable humanity, creating the future Humane Other. They strive to detach from socially conditioned perception and our simian legacy as much as possible, and focus on what really matters: the human being as autonomous conscience in the unvoid.

He has created several pioneering works and is the only author coming from Slovakia, who has been systematically presenting on the global cyberculture scene for almost two decades, while also achieving significant international accolades and worldwide recognition.

Key Works

2013-WIP The Qualia Project

Interactive screens with built-in optical face tracking. The artworks react to face movement and gaze - the cyberscapes morph and transform when they feel onlookers' eyes.

Our perception of art is overwhelmingly driven by factors like where a work is displayed and who is viewing it. The evolution of modern art if anything has conditioned viewers to adopt the position that they can and ought to assign an interpretation of their own preference to any and all art. The Qualia project aims to turn this status quo around by empowering the artworks with perception of their own.

Equipped with computer vision technology and a symbolic grain of sentience, the artworks actively observe their observers and change their form and way of presenting themselves in response to their
surroundings.

Qualia is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. It derives from a Latin word meaning "what sort" or "what kind". This unfamiliar
term denotes something that could not be more familiar: the ways things seem to each of us, to our particular singular selves.
One of the broader definitions is "the 'what it is like' " character of mental states. The way it feels to an autonomous individual entity to have states of feeling pain, seeing a color, hearing a tone.

Instances of human consciousness are unique entities in the unvoid and the Qualia Project artworks choose to present themselves to each according to their own will, to each observer differently. As we
continuously construct our own realities through the very act of perception, the Qualia Project introduces a turn of this paradigm, the worx actively instancing unstable, fluxuous, perception-elusive
realities, inspired by the sciences of quantum chromodynamics and cellular biology.

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2008-15 molding the signifier (_humane after people_)

molding the signifier 2.0 - ConceptArt 2015

molding the signifier - data flow scheme

Art/Science Augmented Life

an overwhelming amount of cells in our body do not have human DNA - we are a mere host, a topography, for billions of bacteria and fungi. Much as we're convinced that our brains run the show, all the while our microbiomes alter our drives, desires, and behaviors to support their own reproduction and evolution. Just as biome networks, are complex data systems beginning to have points of view, and forms of agency that are beyond human comprehension? What exactly IS a human in the light of current science and technology? We need a re-definition of intelligence, agency, consciousness and sentience in ways that go way beyond the anthropomorphic.

"molding the signifier" is an interdisciplinary project on the intersections of art, cybernetics, ecology, linguistics and biology. It draws from a wide array of particular fields, including theories of consciousness, neurolinguistics, cell research and the study of mental illness. It offers multiple layers of irony and a discursive, confrontational and emotionally charged approach as to what constitutes (human) consciousness and how we perceive what is human from a perspective that is very sensitive to the problem of “uncanny valley” – language.

"molding” draws from state-of-the-art biochemical theories that approach the body as a functional conglomerate of myriads of previously autonomous biological agents. The body is understood as a complex ecosystem into itself, like a microcosmic galactical empire with vast holdings and expanses, with billions of different inhabitants, each interdependent but also fighting for power and influence, with consciousness rising as a consequent emergent phenomenon of this microcosmos.

An important observation is that body-ecosystems occurring in nature have no clearly delineated
boundaries, a fact which is very counter-intuitive to our everyday experience of our bodies being “whole” and separate from everything else.

Body-ecosystems are in fact ripe with entry points, permeable membranes of every kind, from the
physical to the psychological. Body-ecosystems are every-day at war, fighting invasions of foreign
agents – from virii to memes, conducting vastly complex exchanges of biochemical information, and
updating their microcodes and along with it the emergent “system database” on the go. But sometimes
an invasion is successful, and the foreign virality ends up reprogramming the eco-code to serve its own
purposes.

The installation deploys an external biological agent to infiltrate and disrupt the body-ecosystem of a virtual human, resulting in a state that we regular humans can perceive as mental
illness. A well known game character has been chosen to be deconstructed as the actor, as that is how most people today are introduced to and come to know virtual humans. This is in effect intended as a social commentary on a culture that is hungry for simulated experiences, yet is stuck on its own evolutionary conditioning – the problem described as the “uncanny valley”.

Data from a contaminated biologic culture (a mold species growing in a petri dish) are continuously monitored via a digital microscope and measured with a set of bioelectric sensors. This real-time input is gradually interspersed into the neuronal logic that govern facial recognition (of exhibition visitors), and the virtual human visualization/simulation, combined with emotion expression and speech synthesis.

The virtual human’s apparent manifestation thus comprises a hybrid bio-electrical/cybernetic system –
three virtual eco-bodies in the process of being infiltrated by a biological agent. The system evolves in time – at the beginning, the virtual humans have a reasonably high level of mimetic semblance to
humans as we know them – they act as convincing conscious persons, engaging visitors in eye contact
and speaking to them. Different emotions appear on the virtual faces, depending on the degree to which
the facial recognition likes or dislikes the situation in the room.

These processes are over time slowly disrupted by the growing contamination, resulting in increasing levels of perceived digital madness. The virtual humans’ facial features start to twitch and contort with increasing intensity, and glossolalia (speaking in tongues) gradually phases out comprehensible speech.

Production was supported by Fundación Telefónica and Institute of Intermedia Prague

2005 ID Engines vert.ego

2003 ID Engines #05 Home Dictate

1998-2003 माया māyā

2001 we don't play anymore

1998-2001 dingir

1998 ID Engines #00 Das Egoshooter

1994-98 homogene

homogene detail01

homogene 1997

homogene detail02

A pioneering work, inspired by science and philosophy which later gave rise to transgenic art and bio-art, homogene is an interactive installation that explored the possible implications of genetically combining humans with animal and plant DNA, at a time when legality of cloning, and violations of moral and ethical codes of conduct in bio-engineering were widely and fiercely discussed for the first time.

homogene is the speculative result of how synthetic biology might satisfy biological urges of the human species while complying versus circumventing societal restraints.

Would the possibility of bio-engineering and then a growing a plant that closely resembles your parent, help? The result being something that is not quite human but that is also not just a plant. It is a combination of the purity that exists in both, the essence of affection one has for their close relative and the serene joy one receives from planting a tree.

Speakers are built-in inside the sculptures themselves and an overhead camera tracks the movement of people around the objects. They react with sound, the expression of the artwork (behaviour of the soundscape) depends on the behaviours and choices of those engaged with it.

The observer becomes an interactant, and the interactant becomes a co-creator: the process of engaging with the installation results in a co-construction of the artwork (and of the artwork's meaning).
The sequential experience of the work is different for each participant, and many facets of the work are not immediately available, but appear during the time spent with it.